From home to Austria
I needed to drive 2000 kilometres from Estonia to Zürich, Switzerland. Google said about 24 hours. A daunting thought. I don’t like to drive, no more than I need to. I walk 40 minutes to work and the same back in the evenings (not because I hate driving, I just don’t care for it), so the need to drive for me is low. In my head I could do max 8 hours a day, so 3 days. In my head I’m also thinking… no you can’t… You’ll get tired, you’ll start risking lives.
Options:
Take Saskia with me. She could keep me “awake” somehow. But Saskia had swimming camp until 19.08 and I planned on leaving right about that time. Also, it would be no fun for her.
So, alone… 8 hours to Lithuania, then a boat to northern Germany and then 8 hours or so back down. That would have been the best option, I think.
Send the car somewhere on a trailer and fly there. One of the best options out there and would have cost us only about 550 Euro’s + flight and train etc. But going by car on your own isn’t in any way cheaper. Did not like that plan, though, to get the car to the correct place in time, we needed to give it up to the company 13 days before. 13 days, that’s like outrageous, we hadn’t even packed yet and needed to pack our world to that car. So that was not an option.
Luckily Kaspar said that he has been showing exemplary behaviour at work and done lots of overtime at work and got some free days. A few hours later I was able to persuade him that a 2000 km long road trip and then a flight home is just what he needs (didn’t go exactly like that, I had asked him several times before already and finally he agreed). In any case, most thankful, a big big load off my shoulders.
The plan
On 19.08 at 15:00 we’d leave our home.
We’d try to see how much we can handle driving in a day and book the accommodation a few hours before arriving there.
We’d arrive in a few (3) days in Innsbruck, Austria.
We stay there for 2 nights.
On 24.08 he’ll fly back (flight bought, accommodation booked) from Munich (no direct flight from Switzerland on that day to Estonia)
I’ll then drive 4 hours from there to pick up the girls.
Thoughts about the plan
I’d say it was the perfect plan, because everything went according to the plan. Some things outside the plan that maybe we should have been included in the plan:
Insurance - 3 days before leaving home we started checking insurance options with Reet. Finally found that Seesam travel insurance works best for us. Seesam, when paying a bit more, covers both the health stuff and accommodation if you need to be quarantined and as a bonus, all over the world, most insurance companies don’t do accommodation stuff nor Outside europe.
Also, because we don’t know where we’re going Yet (after Europe) we didn’t want to pay for USA etc parts of the world as well. Seesam allows us to extend our insurance period And include (or remove?) the coverage areas. So we didn’t have to pay for the whole vacation period with the “around the world” coverage. Well, at least that’s what they said. Our current insurance is for Europe and until 14.11, will see after that.
There is a catch though. The corona stuff will take effect 7 days after the contract signing, so had I gotten sick before the vacation, all would have been lost . And by All I mean almost nothing, because we hadn’t booked anything yet :D, only the flight tickets which were to come later than 7 days and for the girls.
Corona rules when crossing borders is a pain. One Europe, different rules in different countries (just in case, we have a head on our shoulders, so we are vaccinated)
Okay… Latvia was easy, just fill the form less than 48 hours before
Lithuania – fill the form, but More than 48 hours before. < this is where I started to panic.
Every other country that we visited until Italy needed no form when transiting Or driving by car. < I like those countries, because in panic mode, though, I was certain that I misread it or the “reisitargalt” page contained wrong information.
Italy, though, no border control, has the most annoying rule for families, but a bit later on that.
Now, because of the Lithuanian form, I was panicking… what if we were too late… where will we stay, what will we do… and for what? So that no-one would even stop us to check? No border control, until Today at least, has stopped us to check if we have a head on our shoulders or not (not that I’m sad about it), in some places there were no patrols even.
Got to say that Germany, when passing by to Austria was a bit exhilarating, because of big men with machine guns at the border checking a bus that had “immigrant looking people” on it < that would have been annoying.
I know I read about “you should check the driving rules” in “reisitargalt” page but ignored. Maybe shouldn’t have but luckily for us, Poland saved us.
In Poland, driving a normal car on highways is free.
In Germany as well… But we decided to go not through Germany to Austria, but through Czech, because, well, views.
Now, though Poland is free, there are large signs everywhere that you need to buy in case you want to drive (for the Trucks, though). We checked and turned out that:
In Chech you need to have bought a ticket from the internet and that’s that. They magically know that you’re okay (10 euros for 10 days).
In Austria you need to buy one from the gas station and put it on the windscreen (10 euros for 10 days). We did that.
Switzerland is fun, you have to pay 40 Euros for the sticker on the windscreen, because… well, Switzerland, but you can drive until the beginning of next year. I did that.
In Italy… I think it’s still tollbooth based, at least I hope it is :D we’ll see Tomorrow :D.
Another thing that made me understand that I’m a bit too picky because of travelling with Reet a lot, is the accommodation:
My go-to filters in Booking.com is:
free parking – is a given
Single beds – wouldn’t like to cuddle with Kaspar
Breakfast included – I have never liked going out to “find” the best morning restaurant.
9+ rating – this is where it just didn’t make sense for our trip’s first parts and possibly the later ones as well. Why 9+ rating if we’d just go and sleep there?
Now, the biggest fail, again, the plan itself was perfect, but filling the gap. The accommodation in Innsbruck or I should say near Innsbruck.
Found a stay that was 9+.
The views… didn’t mind those. Perfect.
But…
It had a smell… Probably seasonal, probably should have left a review for others, probably should have complained to the owners. Anyway, they or their neighbours were growing cows… that cow poop or something similar was held outside our windows. Now… if one would close the window, you wouldn’t smell that poop. But you’d smell something in my opinion even worse… Dried up poop smell? Couldn’t put a finger on it, but it was bad. Like really bad, so bad that I opened the window to let the fresh poop smell come in, to make it better.
This makes me worry. That accommodation, though 9+ rating, had a smell and that smell… was fine for sleeping only in the end. But what if we had booked it for a week and weren’t planning on going out early in the morning and coming home late in the evening? Risky business…
§ It was 20 minutes from Innsbruck by car with nothing to do there. As a matter of fact, there was nothing for us to do in Innsbruck either. Turns out that had we checked out the Area before, we would have booked a stay one hill Over. I can see this pattern a bit now when travelling with the family as well. We book something and then check what to do there and the interesting stuff is in the next village over or something similar…. Or… I’m going about this the wrong way… We should rather check what we could do nearby instead of searching for the biggest and baddest adventures in the nearby areas.
Remembering the highlights of the trip
Latvia, Lithuania, Czech, Poland – absolutely nothing interesting.
That smelly accommodation had something extra in store for us.
You know like in some countries it’s mandatory to catch fish and then release them. So, you’d need to catch and release. Some people do that voluntarily in Estonia as well.
Well, there was the catch and release rule in that accommodation as well, but in the toilet. You’d go in, sit down, take a dump on the horizontal part of the toilet and use a bit of paper to make things more exciting and adventurous. Then You stand up, check that everything looks good and then release the dump to the world by flushing the dump away. This is probably something I will never get used to (For as long as I remember I have had a toilet where the dump goes straight in the water, not somewhere “in-between”).
Another thing that Austrian accommodation offered us is a restaurant ~20 minutes away from our location. The menu was handwritten with a normal blue pen, have never seen that… anywhere else. Food was very good, though.
We did 2 gondola rides to mountain tops (one even had a 007 museum on top) and walked up to a waterfall. Neither of them I regret and it’s best to show rather than tell, there’s just two but’s:
The gondola rides helped us get to the top of the mountain quickly and thus left us more time at the top (and probably got closer to the top than by hiking – on the 3k meter hill for example), it’s just not the same as hiking to the top (also, expensive). The views are the same… but they… feel fake. Something I must work on.
And the second one, the big one. Seeing the waterfalls and mountain tops without Reet, who, I know, appreciates them as much as I do, is not the same. I know Kaspar liked them, but it’s not the same… For example:
When I said in my Facebook messenger family channel that we went and saw a small waterfall and sent some images, Reet answered: “yeah, not even close to the Iceland ones”. Kaspar just doesn’t get it, for him, that was big enough. Of course, it was big enough for me too (kinda… okay for that location)… but… It’s still smaller than the Iceland ones.
And the mountain tops (and the waterfall). They are missing a model/my muse and Kaspar… just wouldn’t be the sam
And then all alone after dropping Kaspar off at the Airport and 4 hours drive to my women. Alone and panicky as always, because, what if
I drive worse when i’m alone in the car
What if i don’t find the sticker on the windscreen for Switzerland?
